It has been quite sometime i have not written here. Last few months were very busy with several things and that did not allow any time to spend on blogging. I finally managed to get some time here!!

In one of my earlier posts, I elaborated some of the functionalities of the Vendor collaboration/Vendor self-service feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations – Enterprise Edition and what was coming in future releases. With the Fall release (Version 7.3), Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has much more to offer to automate vendor self-service and collaboration, specifically around the vendor user and organization onboarding aspects.

In this post, lets take a look at some of those new features, specifically in the vendor onboarding area.

The diagram below shows an overall representation of how the data flows from a Prospective Vendor to an Approved vendor in D365FO.

Let’s now dig into some of the finer details of the processes and steps underneath each of these steps in the vendor onboarding process.

ProspectiveVendor shows interest to become a potential vendor: Before an organization or individual wants to become a vendor for your organization, they are referred as “Prospective Vendors”. They can apply to be a vendor for your organization either via a website you may have, with anonymous access, or they can apply via a contact at your organization. If they come in through your website, you can have an OData integration with D365FO, to send the prospective vendor’s data into D365FO. Alternately, you can also use Data Management Framework to import the prospective vendor data periodically into D365FO.

After the initial basic data for the perspective vendor comes into D365, it will appear in Prospective Vendors registration under Procurement & Sourcing > Vendor collaboration requests.

Before a procurement personnel from your organization reviews these requests to initiate the vendor invitation process, lets take a look at the workflow that is set up behind the scenes to do all the heavy lifting.

Under System Administration > Workflow > User Workflows, you can set up workflows for adding, modifying or inactivation of a new prospective vendor/existing vendor user. For a new prospective vendor user, the workflow provides your various options to fully control the new user provisioning in Azure AD and new user creation in D365FO.

Take a look at the screenshot below which shows this workflow.

To initiate the invitation process for the new prospective vendor, the procurement personnel will select the required user and review the details. If they decide to proceed with initiating the invitation process, they click the Invite User button.

At this point, the Processing status of the vendor registration request changes to “User requested“. This means a request for setting up a new user account in Azure AD and in D365FO has been initiated in the workflow.

As soon as the user creation request is creation, the personnel setup in the workflow for this will get notified and will process the request further. If you notice the screenshot of the workflow above, the first step in our workflow is to review and approve the user request even before the Azure AD and D365FO user accounts are created.

The Personnel responsible goes into the user request and reviews the details to approve it.

The next step in the workflow is to set up the B2B user account in Azure AD. You can use the manual task within the workflow and assign it to the required person, who then can download the external user setup CSV file for import within Azure AD.

Alternately, you can use the automated task for provisioning the Azure AD B2B user account.If you chose to use the automated task, you need to make sure to complete the below setups.

Register the D365FO app within Azure AD in Azure portal.

Complete the required setup for the API permissions for Microsoft Graph for the D365FO app. The automated task of the user setup workflow will invoke this to provision the user account in Azure AD.

With the above setup done, the automated task will provision the Azure AD user for the vendor user automatically. In the next step of the user setup workflow, you can set up automated tasks for provisioning the user account within D365FO and also send the email notification to the vendor with a URL link to D365 for signup and registration. You can set up an email template and use (%portalURL%) placeholder in the email message, which will automatically include the URL of D365FO, when it sends the email notification to the vendor.

In this demo, the prospective vendor i added was John Smith whose email id was schaudhury@velosio.com. Since i had done all the setups above, ( (John Smith, the vendor) got the email notification with a URL for sign up.

Prospective vendor signs up to D365 and completes registration Wizard:

Now, it is time for the prospective vendor to sign up and complete the registration wizard and provide additional information about their organization.

When the vendor logs in to D365 by clicking the URL in the email invite, they are directly taken to a registration wizard, which appears as shown in screenshot below.

The vendor selects the Country/region first in which they operate in. In this case , i selected USA.

On the next few screens, vendor enters their business information and all necessary details as shown in screenshots below.

You can also configure and assign predefined questionnaire and assign it to the vendor to answer and you also let them select procurement catalog.

New Vendor request created in D365 for review and approval:When done, the vendor submits all the information at the end of the wizard.

This create the new vendor request in D365FO, which will then be reviewed and approved by a procurement or AP person of your organization. Procurement personnel can navigate to Procurement and Sourcing > Vendor collaboration > Vendor requests to see these.

New vendor details reviewed and approved:

The Procurement personnel then completes the review process of the new vendor request and upon confirmation, the new vendor record is automatically setup in the Vendor master. After that, the vendor can have full access to the vendor collaboration portal and they can communicate with your organization in real time on purchase orders, invoices, consignment inventory, RFQs and responses, bidding and more.

That essentially completes the overall vendor onboarding process in D365FO. Stay tuned for more on this.

Having a fully functional vendor self service portal in an enterprise class cloud ERP solution is a huge advantage and allows your organization to streamline the collaboration with vendors, there by helping you reduce back office efforts and improves accuracy of business transactions with vendors and procurement. Dynamics 365 For Operations provides this right out of the box !

In today’s quick post, we will take a look at some of the key capabilities of the Vendor Collaboration/Self-service portal in Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Operations. Let us first look at some of the key setups involved.

Activate a vendor for Self -service/Collaboration:

On the vendor master record > General fast Tab, select Active (PO is auto-confirmed) or Active (PO is not auto-confirmed).

Setup the Primary contact for the vendor. I have setup Erin in this demonstration.

Setup the user account for the vendor contact/vendor user. You will need to setup a Azure AD account for this for the vendor user and assign the Vendor(external) or Vendor admin(external) or both of these roles to this user. Then link the vendor primary contact to this user. Important Note: Note that you would not want to give the System user default role to this user, as this is purely an external user.

Additional Note: Since the vendor is an external user, you would definitely want them to personalize Dynamics 365 screens to add new data fields on their views. To block this, you can Block personalization for the vendor user in Dynamics 365 for Operations.

With the understanding of the some of these basic setups, let us now see , what are some of the key features of the self-service portal.

Shared View of Purchase Order Communications and Responses with Vendor:

Let us say Contoso Entertainment Systems USA wants to order some Wiring Harness and Speaker Units from their vendor Fabrikam Suppliers. The purchasing clerk at Contoso USA creates the PO. The purchase order is shown below.

He then sends the PO to the vendor portal for obtaining confirmation response from vendor.

Notice at this stage, the PO status is “In External Review”.

Now, Erin the contact Fabrikam Suppliers logs in to Vendor portal and can see that the PO that Contoso just sent is right there on the portal. He logs in and navigates to Purchase Order confirmation workspace.

He sees that the PO sent by Contoso appears there and then he goes into the PO details.

At this point, as a vendor Erin from Fabrikam can review the PO header and line details and do the following.

Print a copy or original PO if he needs to send it to anyone else.

Review the PO Header and Line information and Accept or Reject the PO Confirmation request. If he accepts the PO confirmation request, then the PO will be automatically confirmed.

Additionally, Erin can suggest changes on the PO, such as Mode of delivery, Delivery date and Quantity. Erin can also view or attach Notes and documents both at the PO header and line levels at this stage. Let us say he changes the Quantity of the Wiring Harness to 170, as Fabrikam does not see to have enough stock at the moment to fulfill the order.

Eric can substitute a specific PO line if needed. He can also split the delivery of the PO into multiple deliveries for each PO line. Let us say, he splits the delivery of Wiring harness into 2 deliveries as shown below. He also adds appropriate note saying that they can deliver only 170 Qty. of the Harness ordered and they will need to delivery them in 2 schedules.

Erin can now go ahead and Accept all the changes he suggested and proceed further Accepting the PO with changes. He clicks on Accept with changes on the PO. At this point, Contoso will review the suggested changes on the PO on their side and confirm the changes, after which Eric has to do the final acceptance without making any further changes.

The purchasing clerk at Contoso can now view the suggested changed and accept the changes followed by final acceptance from the vendor.

Vendors can manage their Contacts and New Collaboration Users easily:

The primary contact/user at the vendor can view and manage the contacts and users for the vendor portal.

They can create new contacts and request to provision new vendor users for collaboration portal.

Can update contact information of the vendor users any time, anywhere.

Vendors can view and inquire on invoices and payments using the portal workspace:

Vendor can review the status of the their invoices and payments online.

Create purchase order invoices and upload invoice documents on the portal.

Inquire status of payment for the invoices.

Vendor can view and inquire information about consignment inventory:

Vendor portal and Vendor collaboration feature continues to be one of the major investment areas for Microsoft in Dynamics 365 For Operations, which means we will only continue to see more and more new features in the upcoming platform updates in next few months. Stay tuned !!